Messages

2446

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Enemy Special/Magic Attacks

« on: June 01, 2008, 08:02:23 PM »

It would be nice if someone was able to test those 4 spells and/or look into its ASM... and maybe find out which monsters use it (might have to use FF4 instead since some of the battle scripts are different than those in FF2 and FF4ET).

2447

Game Modification Station / FF4 - Random Ideas on Improving 2-Handed Weapons

« on: May 30, 2008, 04:17:12 PM »

I hadn't gotten around to writing this, but if anyone have considered improving 2-Handed Weapons (particularly Axes), then here are some ideas you may want to play with.

Note: I will use the axe as a reference, for the sake of pointing out that the Poison and Rune Axe suck, relatively speaking.


1) Increase defense - Make it so that say 1/8 of the axe's attack power increases the defense of the character. This tends to increase the defense power of the character enough to take less damage, but doesn't help if you go full heavy armor (think of Kain or Cid, since Cecil has lots of Wizard armor alternatives). The defensive impact is minimal late game though since the defense multiplier and evade become more important. Compared to shields, shields provide mostly evade than defense, so that's the unique swap there. Note that the strongest possible axe you can create will increase up to 31 defense, which does have a nice impact there (it's good if you don't plan or don't want to use defensive race properties in the armor). You will still be taking damage though...

Edit: Changed 1/4 to 1/8 instead.

2) Increase evade - Make it so that say 1/4 of the axe's hit rate increases the evade of the character. This helps a lot when shields are the greatest factors in increasing defense via evade. The highest you can get here is 24% (or maybe more, but someone would have to make this code first to test it out)), which is far less than the best shield in this game (FF4, not FF4A) can provide (40% evade for the Crystal Shield), but still not be that overpowering. Note that the hit rate does have to be reasonably high or it will suck. The Hand Axe is not a good weapon if that was available when you have Cid, only because its pathetic hit rate will do below average damage for Cid vs his very accurate hammers. Trading evade for an underpowered Cid is a terrible option IMO. If the evade bonus can go up to 63% evade, there can be problem balancing this...

3) Increase defense multiplier... - Make it so that the axe is classified as a shield, so the defensive multiplier bonus of level/16 is applied. This is a bit more effective than increasing defense, although it has the same evade constraint problem. I've found that the Heroine Robe/Minerva Bustier has gives Rosa+Rydia near physical immunity in the Lunar Subterrain late game (particularly if you are stat boosting post level 70). Even if they have a high defense multiplier, it doesn't counter the low evade.. which is what the Heroine Robe provides (40% evade is not something to scoff at). This seems like a safer/the safest bet to change...

Here's a brief review/overview of having a 2 handed weapon vs a weapon+shield combo...

1) Lowered defense - A shield provides some semblence of defense, but not a lot in comparison to the other details.

2) No shield multiplier bonus - this is what the shield thrives on to be very useful. In the late game, this becomes very huge in terms of bonuses.

3) Lowered evade - The evade is where the important calculations are at. Increasing this helps more significantly in conjunction with a high defense multiplier which has the greatest impact of reducing overall intake of damage.

Standard counters to fixing this (assuming you are not trying out my ideas)

1) Increase Agility - Since the defense multiplier is derived from this stat, increasing this will have the greatest impact... +15 to Agility will nearly guarantee a 2x defense multiplier bonus. However, this also makes the character go significantly faster, and that may need to be accounted for in monster balance. Note that late game that Agility can be maxed by most characters...

2) Increase Vitality/Stamina - Given that defense is worsened, you can attempt to compensate it here. The best case you can do this is to boost +15 to it and gain +7 or +8 defense, which isn't really significant, though it can counter only the defense loss that a shield provides (just not the multiplier or evade though). This has minimal impact overall, although most characters don't ever really max this stat out (except for Cecil) because Agility has a far greater impact in this game.

Ok, thoughts, constructive criticism, and mentioning stuff I didn't consider is appreciated.

2448

Gaming Discussion / Re: The man who invented espertime is at it again

« on: May 30, 2008, 10:53:34 AM »

It amazes me that someone who is so knee-jerkingly averse to "wasting time" in a video game is posting on that game's messageboard 14 years after its release.  Does rabies blind one to hypocrisy, or is some other disease responsible?

I believe turrets is more responsible. There's nothing that screams grind than learning spells.

Furthermore, he's claimed that the designers didn't "intend" for you to use status ailments against bosses (because once again, he knew their plans).  A cookie for anybody who can tell me what self-evidently refutes that claim. 

Well, Debilitator is overpowered, and accounts for Poison abuse vs the Ice Dragon. Then, there's Confusion vs KatanaSoul... Imp vs Retainer (not a boss, but most notable), Stop vs Poltergeist... and there's a few other obvious ones I can't recall off the top of my head.

Edit: Then there's Tentacles taking Poison damage...

In fact, FF5 exposes this quite a bit as well, so it's not a coincidence that this occurs in other later games since FF5.

2449

Gaming Discussion / Re: The man who invented espertime is at it again

« on: May 26, 2008, 08:08:46 PM »

IIRC, it's either the act of learning spells or stat boosting with espers.

2450

Gaming Discussion / Re: Movies of playthrus

« on: May 26, 2008, 04:49:24 PM »

I often wonder what's really at work to produce the AI behavior... the sucky pathing, or the sucky AI. I think both is at work, but I wonder if all the balance tweaks actually affect the AI building script...

2451

Gaming Discussion / Re: The man who invented espertime is at it again

« on: May 26, 2008, 04:46:46 PM »

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Where's the emoticon that should go with that?

Seriously, Esper time makes me lose interest in the game... it's never been a fun ride.

2452

Gaming Discussion / Re: Life trick in FF2us/FF4 for those who do not know.

« on: May 25, 2008, 08:46:05 PM »

IIRC, the answer is no.

2453

Gaming Discussion / Re: Life trick in FF2us/FF4 for those who do not know.

« on: May 25, 2008, 07:09:11 PM »

Does it have any special effects,

No, it's just monster revival. Nothing uber special.

or does it just bring back the monster so you can kill it again.

Yes, you do this for harvesting experience, but more importantly, item drops.

2454

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Life2 and The Flan/Pudding Phenomenon

« on: May 25, 2008, 06:43:11 PM »

I bumped the life trick thread since there are other relevent details to it (it was detailed in BSiron's FAQ), but for the most part there are some interesting notes with that. Refer to this thread: http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?topic=151.0

1) Even though Break/Stone kills the enemy, it's current status is retained and thus Life2 refuses to work.

2) Most enemies tend to continue their battle script, but they tend to "counter" you with their spell counter script upon revival.

3) My only guess is to why Life2 works is that there is no discernable equivalent enemy Vitality/Stamina stat to derive the HP for the enemy revival, thus it failing hard. Life2 revives the enemy to maximum HP (though, it is untested at higher HP threasholds...)

4) It may simply be the high defense at work, but reviving Flan/Pudding monsters seem to prevent even high physical powered attacks (including Jump)  to do any decent damage on the revived monster. Something goes screwy in the battle engine to keep the monster becoming nearly invulnerable to physical attacks. Killing another monster or kill the revived pudding/flan monster with magic will fix this behavior.

5) Note that Life2 works different from the monster's "Call/Summon/Alert", since monsters generated by the latter tends to have all statuses removed, whereas Life2 does not do that (which make sense, but it's an interesting distinction worth noting). So, you can see revived toad, piggy, and/or small monsters be revived by this method... keeping them in a continuously harmless state.


I can't think of anything else off the top of my head, but I'm sure this may be helpful somehow.

2455

Gaming Discussion / Re: Life trick in FF2us/FF4 for those who do not know.

« on: May 25, 2008, 06:30:11 PM »

I think bumping this is appropriate for a little bit.

This trick works on monsters that don't have Death resistance and/or are not bosses.

Also, killing a monster via Stone/Break won't allow this trick to work.

2456

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: FF2/4/4A Monster Resistances

« on: May 25, 2008, 06:15:30 PM »

Well, it's simply just death. Odin isn't classified as instant death (it doesn't inflict Death status to be specific), even though the result is that.

That sounds a bit better than the previously documented behavior and oddly sounds like obscure, but sane behavior.

This behavior seems to be applying to FF4A as well.

2457

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: FF2/4/4A Status Resistances

« on: May 25, 2008, 11:10:23 AM »

Does protection against Gradual Petrification also imply protection against Petrification and vice versa?

No, they're separate from one another but nothing in the game actually has one set without the other.

Working through the equipment, I noticed that this isn't quite true. The Gaea Robe has protection against 1/3 petrification and 2/3 petrification, but not Stone. However, it does seem to protect from Stone as well as 1/3 and 2/3 petrification. Not sure why.

It's not as obvious in FF4 than in FF4A. In FF4A, Gradual Petrification is also set with Stone. In FF4, Gradual Petrification and Stone is sharing the same Petrification. In the FF4 editor, you will see that both petrification attacks have "causes stone", which is consistant with this behavior. It is symbiotic behavior.

Also, I just realized that I always thought the Gaea Robe had "extra protection" against Quake (from the information from numerous FAQs), but this can't possibly be true. It's not an element, and uses the same damage calculation formula as all other basic spells (Fire1, Ice1, Fire2, etc.). I checked the subroutine, and it didn't have any obvious check for wearing the Gaea Robe, so I doubt there's anything that way. Took me long enough to realize it . . . 

It's called manual errata. Ever noticed why the Cockatrice's Beak never worked on Palom and Porom, but not Cecil? There's your answer.

2458

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Elemental Reference Guide

« on: May 24, 2008, 09:01:02 PM »

What sucks is that the battle engine has been barely tapped.. so its potential has yet to be realized... FF4A seems to limit the potential of the engine, but I could be wrong.

2459

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: A Look Into Cagnazzo...

« on: May 24, 2008, 08:58:34 PM »

I'd say you should pm Dragonsbrethren.

Most of the battle logic has been decyphered, but the "parsing" done to produce the script isn't quite perfect yet, so I couldn't determine some of the final spells. Most of the last unnamed spells are primarily boss-scripted events.

2460

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Elemental Reference Guide

« on: May 24, 2008, 08:36:37 PM »

I'm not sure if "force" is a good term for anti-immune. I like "pierce" better.

For a thought, the way the game may be checking immunity has an order (which should be obvious), and the comparison is most likely made by a bitwise AND operation and if the result is 0, then it goes onto the next check...